Doing Research About Education (PDF)

schools. Since I had left my LEA job just as the National Curriculum was coming in, I felt that not only had I been too long outside the classroom but that the changes in UK schools which had taken place during the 1990s (following the Education Reform Act 1988 and the Education Act 1993) were so vast that my research would be seriously weakened if I did not soon spend some significant time in schools on some basis.

Third, I happened to know a teacher of a Year 5 class (‘Mr Stuart’) who was concerned about many of the issues we were interested in investigating. These issues revolved around questions about what young children understand when they talk, as so many of them do, about boyfriends/girlfriends, dating, ‘dumping’, ‘two-timing’, ‘going out’ and so on. How, we wanted to know, are these discursive practices (including talk) gendered and how far are they part of the construction of gender within and through schooling? Can they be seen as strategies for establishing gender boundaries (see Thorne, 1993)? To what extent can we see, played out in the primary school context, the imposition, policing and performance of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Butler, 1990; Rich, 1980)? And in what ways, when children ‘do (heterosexual) gender’, is this performed through ethnicity, class and other social divisions? Conversations with Mr Stuart led to the idea that I could spend time in his class conducting a small-scale study as a pilot for developing our previously unsuccessful research proposal in order to have another go at obtaining funding. This more or less haphazard combination of theoretical/research interests, pragmatic approaches and personal networks is fairly typical, I believe, of most research projects, though often accounts are much more seamless than this one might appear.

In this chapter, I will try to trace the development of the research as well as considering some of the issues which are raised by doing research on such sensitive topics as gender and sexuality in primary schools. Here, I will be particularly concerned with three issues: first, the limitations of the adoption of the ‘least adult role’ by the researcher; second, and related, how children understand the presence of the researcher, and what this might mean in the production of meaning within the research process; and third, ethical questions, particularly around ‘informed consent’ which arise when doing research on children and which may be made even more acute when dealing with sensitive topics like gender, sexuality, ‘race’, and identity (all key areas of interest for me). Much of this is grist to the feminist mill and this chapter arises directly out of my engagement with feminist methodological debates. I do not, in this context, intend to lay out in detail either the case for feminist research or the ins and outs of previous writing, which readers can, in any case, follow up for themselves.5 Rather, my focus will be on those issues which intrigued, worried or pleased me as a feminist researcher during the course of this particular smallscale project.